Knight of the Demon Queen (15 page)

“And what voices are these?”

Bliaud let out a nervous bleat and looked around him
again. “In … in dreams. They told me my house was being watched, which is absurd. Completely absurd. Prince Gareth promised me—promised us all—that no one on the council blamed us—well, hardly anyone—for being overpowered and possessed…”

“But you still hear ’em whisperin’,” John said quietly, and saw Bliaud’s eyes shift.

Like Ian, the elderly sorcerer looked as if he hadn’t slept since the last full moon of summer.

Jen and Ian have one another
, he thought.
Neither of ’em can speak of it—all Jen can do is sit in pain so deep she can’t even help her own son—but each knows the other went through it, too.

Bliaud, despite his two well-meaning sons—
And the Old God knows what they thought of their dad’s behavior
—was alone.

“I don’t…” Bliaud wet his lips. “I don’t ever listen.” He drew a deep breath, and John knew he lied.

Every night
, he thought. And every night remembering, as Jenny remembered, the evil he had done in those days when the world was one vast joyous holocaust of colored fire. Knowing he’d done those things and knowing the pain the demon had put him through and knowing, too, the penalties—fire and the wheel and the executioner’s knife—and wanting it anyway. Wanting the demon back.

Bliaud’s eyes met John’s squarely for one moment, naked and begging.

He was not begging to hear him say
I understand
— he could see, John guessed, that he understood. He was begging to hear,
It’s all right. No one will blame you. Go back
.

The old man turned his eyes aside. In a quiet voice he said, “They told me to bring things here: clothing, and food, and silver, and gold as well. They said I should lay
wyrds of disguise about myself and my horse, that none might see where I went.” His glance shifted past John’s shoulder to the archway of what had been the crypt door, visible now in winter with the dying of the vines. Something altered in his eyes: curiosity, realization, hunger.

To break that longing gaze, John said briskly, “Well, let’s have ’em, then. I’m clemmed.”

Bliaud looked back twice over his shoulder as they climbed the steps to the old garden.
If I was on Gar’s council
, John thought,
I’d have this one’s head, no error
. He felt the heat of the ink bottle against his flesh, under his doublet, and wondered if Bliaud knew it was there.

And he wondered what he could do about it if the mage decided to take it from him.

But Bliaud offered him no threat, merely sat on a fallen pillar, keeping wards of concealment and misdirection— probably utterly unnecessary in the emptiness of the Bel Marches—in place while John shaved, even weaving spells of heat to warm the air around them and the water in the old marble pool, so John could bathe before he changed his clothes. “You have no horse?” Bliaud remarked at one point. “Did you journey far?”

His eyes were on the cuts John had taken from the shining things—and, John was aware, on the pile of his clothes.

“Farther than you’ll know.” John dried himself roughly and fast and collected the ink bottle first thing. It had been a toss-up whether to keep it thonged about his neck or to leave it concealed in his clothes while he washed.

“Did you … I mean, were you working for … That is…” Bliaud waved his hands uncertainly, the gold stampwork on his blue leather gloves glinting in the rising
sun, and his glance shifted to the vine-draped hillside below them, to the dark eye of the crypt. “I understand from my sons that you were in debt to the demons—that you owed them a teind and were doing their bidding.”

“Gaw.” John pulled on his breeches, then his boots, shivering where the cold winds breathed through the heat spells. “If that’s what’s bein’ noised about me, I’m lucky the Regent’s never sent troops back north, ain’t I?”

“Is it true?”

He stamped his boots into place and got into the clean shirt and his doublet, tucking the ink bottle and the bag of flax seeds out of sight. He looked back up to meet the old man’s desperate eyes.

“Master Bliaud,” he said, more gently than he’d thought he would speak to one of Aohila’s servants. “A month ago me son Ian tried to kill himself because of a demon whisperin’ to him in his dreams. The demon that was in my Jen won’t let her rest—not that it’s truly there, or able to speak out of the Hell to which I sent him when they left you, no more than that’s really me dad shoutin’ at me in me dreams.”

Bliaud looked quickly away.

“If you called ’em back,” John went on, buckling the straps of his doublet, flexing his arm in a jangle of chain and spikes, “it wouldn’t heal the pain you’re feelin’ now. It’d only let ’em drink that pain and laugh at you when the Regent had you killed for the Realm’s sake. You know that.”

The little man nodded. A wealthy gentleman of good family in Greenhythe, he’d lived most of his life, John recalled, in genteel retirement, keeping his talents discreetly concealed so as not to bring upon his family the stigma of being mageborn in the South.

He’d only ridden north the previous summer at the
behest of the Regent, who’d said the Realm needed mages to survive. And the very tutor to whom he’d entrusted himself had raped him of mind and will, imprisoned his self in a sapphire’s heart, and put a demon into his body.

He had asked for none of this: pain, shame, memories more foul than the worst of nightmares, and emptiness— that awful sense that without the demon, there could be no more joy in life.

He’d only wanted to help.

It was all in his eyes.

Then he wet his lips with a hesitant pale tongue and asked, “Did you … Do you have a demon helper, a demon guide? May I see it?”

Were I king
, John thought as he later saw Bliaud ride away with his unloaded packhorse, his shimmer of snowy mist and illusion,
I’d have him killed tonight
.

For the good of the Realm.

And maybe meself as well.

The gates of paradise lay beyond the Hell of Winds.

Aversin was never sure whether the Hell of Winds was actually as he saw it or merely an illusion of some demon intent on trapping him and Amayon in howling lightless mazes forever. Or intent on
something
, anyway.

It was hard to tell about Hells.

The place didn’t even make the marginal sense of the Realm behind the Mirror of Isychros or the wastelands roved by the Shining Things. Bridges spanned gaping, endless abysses, and broken railless stairways climbed the wet black cliffs, but they seemed built for no purpose. “Are they just for decoration, like?” he inquired when, hammered by exhaustion, he insisted they stop in a circular stone pit like a dry well that offered some shelter from the winds. “Or is this a regular route from Ernine to that place I saw in the pool?”

The pit was floored in thin flat slabs of crystal that cut his leather sleeves like razors. Holding a piece of it up to the weak greenish light Amayon had called into being, he saw that one edge was beveled; it was the same kind of dark-hued glass that the hunter woman in the Hell of the Shining Things had carried about her neck to identify demons with.

“You don’t understand.” Amayon looked annoyed, as
at a child’s questions regarding the color of the sky. He was trim and clean, not even wet from the spray flying down out of the darkness. With two days’ growth of beard, and mud and rain slicking his clothes and hair and spectacles, John wanted to slap him.

“Well, it’d be a waste of both our time to ask if I
did
understand, now, wouldn’t it?”

“Every Hell has a secret.” Amayon gave him a sly red-lipped smile. “And every Hell has a lord. Mostly you never see the lord, but guessing the secret can be the difference between…”

“Life and death?”

The demon laughed; a thin bright tinkling sound. “Silly. What are those? Guessing the secret can be the difference between getting out and not getting out.”

Even had the demon guide not been with him, John would have known enough not to follow the lights he sometimes half glimpsed—cold and green, or warm doorways of inviting amber—at the ends of mysterious stairs and causeways. In a gully filled with fire he saw a chained man who looked like his father, weeping and dragging at the bonds that held him to the rocks. There were other people there as well, half glimpsed through the smoke. “It’s illusion,” John said, “isn’t it? Like the whisperers in the Mire?”

And the demon smiled sidelong at him and said, “Human souls have to go someplace when they die. Go down and speak to him.”

The man looked up with heat-demolished eyes and shouted something to them, where they stood on the bridge above. John couldn’t hear above the roaring and crackle of the blaze. He could have been crying,
Help
. He could have shouted,
John
.

“It’s like the whisperers.” John held up the dark fragment
of glass he’d found, catching the reflection in it as the hunter woman had done. The fire was gone— illusion—but there was something in the pit, something cloaked in shadow and impossible to see clearly. It might still have been his father.

“Whatever it comforts you to believe,” Amayon said. And the demon purred almost audibly at the taste of doubt and guilt and pain as John walked across the bridge and away. Nevertheless, though John saw no other evidence of other demons—if in fact the illusion was that of a demon—he noticed that Amayon kept close to his side and didn’t attempt any little tricks.

Unless of course opening the gates of paradise was a trick.

If it was, it worked.

That first day in the green warm sweetness of meadow and woodland, all John did was sleep. He stoppered Amayon in the ink bottle and set snares and warning traps all around the thicket of laurel and wild roses where he lay down, though he’d seen no sign of any creature larger or fiercer than a roe deer. His sleep was like drowning in tepid water. He dreamed of Jenny, healed, brushing her long hair again—it had grown in gray, like fog in moonlight—and of Ian and Adric as young men, talking in the sunset of a rich autumn with promise of a plentiful harvest to come. The light was waning as he woke, but it seemed to be summer here, the woods fragrant with briar and honeysuckle. He spent an hour in the fading light scribbling on his scraps of parchment: the apparent route through the stone mazes, the fiery sigils that had marked the gate to paradise, the broken glass in the pit.

How had the glass come to the hunter woman, who
looked as if she had been born and raised in the Hell where she was trapped?

All Hells have a secret
, Amayon had said.

If he wasn’t lying, of course.

Then he ate some of the bread and fruit Bliaud had brought him—for he wasn’t sure whether tasting the fruits of paradise would have the same consequences as those of Hell, and he wasn’t ready to risk delay—and lay down and slept again.

Fairy lights wakened him, and fairy music.

They circled him like butterflies, bobbing spots of luminosity in the cobalt velvet of the night. All the meadow before him was starred and frosted with the light of similar rings, and in the trees where the ground was lower he saw a young stag browsing, fey lights wreathed and sparkling on its horns. Only when he reached out his hand to those gently glittering powder puffs of light did their true nature become obvious.

Pain lanced his palm where they bit. Shoots of cold pierced his arm, taking his breath. He tried to shake them off and couldn’t. He whipped his knife from its sheath and sliced them away, but their stings remained in his flesh, he felt them bore deeper, each twisting and hooking with a separate, greedy life. He dug at them, the blood trickling down, and the pink and blue lights settled on the dripped gore. They reflected sickly greenish in the fragment of beveled glass, he noticed before dizziness swamped him and he dropped to his knees.

Then more lights drew near. They fastened on his wrists and face and dug through the sleeves of his shirt, staining the linen with blood. The stag walked nearer, tilting its head, and squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits soft as baby’s breath emerged from the thicket’s shadow, fairy light glowing green from their greedy eyes.

John managed to yank the stopper from the ink bottle as his fingers got cold and numb. Amayon cursed, kicked the nearest demon bunny aside, and snatched up another one, biting through the soft fur of its neck. Blood squirted horribly; the demon sucked up blood and life while the rabbit bit, screamed, and manifested claws and mouths and tentacles to rip at him. The other creatures retreated, and grinning like a mad dog Amayon pursued them, catching the little pink stinger feys and popping them into his mouth.

He came back, smiling, to where John lay among the ferns with sweat streaming from his face as the pain went deeper and deeper still. “I think it’s been five hundred years since a human got into this Hell,” the demon boy said conversationally, seating himself among the ferns beside John’s shoulder. He plucked a violet, savoring its scent, and tucked the blossom behind his ear. “I gather he didn’t last long. Well, longer than he wanted to, anyway.”

John tried to speak and couldn’t, jaws aching from the effort not to scream. He knew that would come, too, and soon. He managed to say, “Aohila.”

Men don’t leave me
, she had said. It was a good bet demons didn’t, either, and he saw the change in Amayon’s face at the mention of her name.

The anger at being reminded that he, too, was a servant vanished at once. “Wonderful how a little sting will make anyone hide behind a woman’s skirts,” the demon mocked. “But don’t worry.” He leaned over John and stroked his face with a grass blade, the mere touch engendering a wave of nauseating agony where the things the stingers had turned into wriggled and dug through muscle and nerve and flesh. “I won’t let you die.”

Then, with the air of a connoisseur settling himself to
sweetmeats and wine, the demon lay back on the ferns to enjoy an extended feast of pain.

    
There is slavery and slavery
, Caradoc had said.